Tricia Serviss

Santa Clara University, English, Faculty Member

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Address: www.triciaserviss.org

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Galen Strawson

The University of Texas at Austin

Diane Pecorari

University of Leeds

Josiah Heyman

University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP)

E. Wayne Ross

University of British Columbia

Andreas Umland

National University of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy"

Paul Kei Matsuda

Arizona State University

Andrea Peto

Central European University

Benjamin Noys

University of Chichester

Zak Lancaster

Wake Forest University

Kent A Ono

University of Utah

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Publications by Tricia Serviss

Writing from Sources, Writing from Sentences

by Tricia Serviss and Tanya Rodrigue

Instead of focusing on students' citation of sources, educators should attend to the more fundame... more Instead of focusing on students' citation of sources, educators should attend to the more fundamental question of how well students understand their sources and whether they are able to write about them without appropriating language from the source. Of the 18 student research texts we studied, none included summary of a source, raising questions about the students' critical reading practices. Instead of summary, which is highly valued in academic writing and is promoted in composition textbooks, the students paraphrased, copied from, or patchwrote from individual sentences in their sources. Writing from individual sentences places writers in constant jeopardy of working too closely with the language of the source and thus inadvertently plagiarizing; and it also does not compel the writer to understand the source.

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A history of New York state literacy test assessment: Historicizing calls to localism in writing assessment

Drawing upon archival materials, I describe the history, design, and assessment of literacy tests... more Drawing upon archival materials, I describe the history, design, and assessment of literacy tests from early 20th century New York state. Practitioners working with these early standardized writing tests grappled with tensions created by public Nativist sentiment, the legislation of "literacy," and calls to score the tests in standardized yet locally appropriate ways. These practitioners developed their own constructs for "reading," "writing," and "literacy" as they administered and scored the tests. These practitioners were enacting writing assessment theories and methods that are currently valorized in calls to local writing assessment, disrupting some assumptions about writing assessment history as a move from strict standardization to more contextualized, local approaches. Practitioner efforts also provide a way forward as we continue to negotiate between calls to localism and standardization.

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